It should probably come as no surprise to the board and top managers of Yahoo that the just-released annual poll of its workers — called the Yahoo Employee Satisfaction Survey — paints a picture of a deeply demoralized workplace.

Apparently, Yahoos can’t get no satisfaction.

The YESS questions went out to employees the week that the company fired CEO Carol Bartz, with most of the responses gathered in the ensuing weeks.

One major drop — not much of a shockeroo — was the employee assessment of senior leadership, under the question of whether “Yahoo is an effectively managed well-run organization.” That dropped 11 percent from last year.

Also troubling, according to numerous sources who have recounted the results to me, was that 19 percent of employees said they planned to leave the company within less than a year, in case a better opportunity arises.

(I like to call that the anywhere-but-here question.)

This is a large figure for any tech company for such a survey, which is commonly done throughout the industry. Typically, those numbers are around 10 percent, according to several human resources execs I queried, although Yahoo’s chart noted that the industry benchmark was 14 percent.

In any case, this YESS is Yahoo’s highest percentage of negatives for departure intent in several years.

Worse, it is higher in the product unit, where most of Yahoo’s engineers work and which is key to any technology company’s viability. Intent not to stay is 21 percent in the division.

On the plus side, numbers for manager effectiveness, teamwork and accountability did grow year over year in the product unit.

YESS documents sentiments I have been hearing widely and ever louder anecdotally from a plethora of mid-level managers at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Most are worried that they cannot hold onto critical employees as Yahoo is conducting a major strategic review of its businesses, either to sell it or make sweeping changes.

The uncertainty has put its employees on edge and there has been a spike in attrition throughout the company.

And worry. At a recent meeting with its staff, interim CEO Tim Morse was buffeted with questions about the fate of employee stock options and other similar issues.

Despite all the turmoil, Yahoo has surprisingly not yet put an overall new plan into place for retention, although it has given some employees more money and other benefits.

“Can a company collapse from attrition?” one exec joked to me recently.

Yes, it can, which has to be of prime concern to the board of Yahoo, as it seeks to right itself. I cannot stress enough how many talented and committed employees remain at the company, desperately hoping for some effective leadership to finally take hold.

Because for all the swirl of what will happen to the whole company, one truism of technology innovation in Silicon Valley remains, if you want to survive: It’s still all about the talent.

[UPDATE: Here are some more YESS stats, according to sources:

"Yahoo is innovative": 42 percent agree, 27 percent neutral, 31 percent disagree.

"Yahoo anticipates changing customer needs and wants": 33 percent agree, 37 percent disagree, five points worse than the previous year.

But here is the hopeful kicker: 79 percent feel proud to say they work for Yahoo.]

Of all the fantastic characters on the brilliant HBO comedy series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the one I can never get enough of is JB Smoove, the innovative comic who plays Larry David’s best sidekick, Leon Black.

Here is an insidery, slightly tasteless, but decidedly funny spoof video of Smoove taking over Hollywood’s William Morris Endeavor talent agency on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday.

In it, Smoove decides to “run sh*t!“

And so he does:

Today, in an internal meeting of its VP-level execs, Yahoo’s interim CEO Tim Morse said of the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s strategic review that “we know time is a constraint and we are mindful we have to go quickly.”

Morse, who is largely seen as a figurehead by Yahoo insiders and a proxy for the board after the recent firing of CEO Carol Bartz, held the confab this morning.

(Note to Tim: I don’t know why I am not just invited to these Yahoo gatherings, since it would make my life a lot easier.)

Back to the meeting action: Morse got a lot of questions from the execs, who were very concerned by the muddled swirl of rumors about the future of Yahoo, including a possible sale.

While saying he was open to all questions, Morse began with an explanation for the group that he could not answer “unwise” ones that he either did not have insight into or could not answer in a semi-public forum.

That included upcoming quarterly results, retention plans and, of course, sale offers.

Only wise questions, peeps! (And no wisenheimer stuff, either!)

Of course, no one paid attention to that request. They launched instead into multiple queries about the strategic plan the board is working on.

Morse told the group that there was interest in Yahoo and that its banking advisers were reaching out to those “we think we should be talking to.”

He added, noting that Yahoo had to focus on its ongoing business: “We know time is a constraint and we are mindful we have to go quickly” on the strategic review of what to do.

Previously, the board has said the process would take months, which is too glacial, considering.

There was also a question about the stock and the risks to their jobs in any deal. Cautioning that he could not say what would happen, Morse assured them that any party that buys the company would likely want to retain talent.

Someone else asked what a good buyer would look like. Morse replied that it would be someone who was good for employees, for shareholders and for customers.

But not good for the wretched media!

Morse took particular aim at us, noting that the press was writing stories “because they make money out of clicks.”

Actually, while we will take the clicks, AllThingsD is writing stories so Yahoos and everyone else can get a clearer picture of what is going on, as opposed to the incessant corporate confusion coming from Yahoo.

(By the way, just sayin’, but Yahoo also likes the clicks to its pages.)

One person asked if Yahoo was officially for sale. Morse said, “No, we are not trying to sell the company.” Then, he blamed the media again for misreading co-founder Jerry Yang’s recent memo about evaluating options as code for a sale.

Which it was — and you can take that click to the bankers.

A Yahoo spokeswoman, natch, declined to comment.

According to sources close to the situation, Guilherme Ribenboim, VP and managing director of Latin America and U.S. Hispanic markets, has left Yahoo for another job at a start-up.

The 12-year Yahoo veteran, who is located in Brazil, is widely respected at the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant and leads an area that is growing for it.

[UPDATE: A Yahoo spokeswoman confirmed the departure of Ribenboim.]

[UPDATE NO. 2: Also leaving: Connie Lee Schiefer, the well-regarded Yahoo veteran of more than eight years. She was VP of product management at Yahoo's cloud platform group.]

Sources said that attrition — already a big problem at Yahoo — is about to hit the company hard. While the board and its top leaders try to figure out a strategy — either a sale or whatev — in the wake of the firing of CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo has yet to put in place a new plan to hold onto talent.

“The people walking out the door is about to become a flood, unless management acts,” said one employee in a common sentiment among people I have interviewed at Yahoo.

To: Everyone

Re: The Memo

There was a whole lot of hubbub last week about an internal email that Groupon’s CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason sent out to the employees of the Chicago-based social buying company, which AllThingsD got hold of and published.

A lot of the noise centered less around the content of the memo — which sought to answer back at Groupon’s growing chorus of ever-noisier critics, who have been relentlessly pillorying the company over a range of financial issues since it filed for an IPO in June — than on the hows and whys of its release.

And, of course, whether the email would get Groupon into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission over whether Mason had touted the company in violation of regulatory disclosure rules.

News of that happening or not will come sooner than later, I suspect, but it is my impression that the very release of Mason’s defense of Groupon in a missive sent out to thousands of staffers — Hey, Henry, how is it that you didn’t get the memo? — says one clear thing about the sentiment of the company’s leadership.

And that is: They could not be more pleased at finally having their say and they couldn’t care less about anything other than being able to strike a blow against the withering attacks.

There are several reasons for this, according to many sources I spoke with this week about the fallout from the email, most of which center around the impact of the negative press on employee morale and the ability to attract new talent.

“It’s made it very difficult for those working at Groupon,” said one source. “But, worse, is how much our reputation is getting burned in the eyes of young engineers we need to recruit.”

What management at the company does not seem to be as worried about, said sources, is investor disinterest when it comes time to hawk and price the public offering.

While the general Wall Street turbulence might spell a lower valuation, sources said Groupon’s execs and board expect to be oversubscribed when it finally gets out on the market.

That’s why Mason — along with some detailed defenses of Groupon’s most controversial issues — tossed off gems like this one:

“For now we must patiently and silently endure a bit more public criticism as we prepare to birth this IPO baby — a breed for which there are no epidurals.”

Since I do happen to know about birthing babies (and Mason decidedly does not): Ouchie!

We’ll see soon enough exactly who will be feeling that pain.

Until then, here’s the classic didn’t-you-get-the-memo movie clip from the hilarious “Office Space”:

Today’s stock market rout hit tech stocks hard, with most declining as much as the broader indices.

With the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 4.3 percent and Nasdaq off 5.1 percent, shares of Google, Microsoft, AOL and Apple managed to stay in that range of losses.

Not so Yahoo and LinkedIn, whose shares were off 7.8 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively.

LinkedIn, the business networking site which reported its second-quarter earnings today, saw its shares seesaw down and up and down and then up again today.

While its results were in line with Wall Street expectations, the company also created some worry after it said profit margins are going to be cut in half for the next quarter.

Still, after its huge fall earlier today, in after-hours trading, LinkedIn has recovered a bit and is now up five percent.

But Yahoo has continued its increasingly troubling stock drop after the markets closed. Its shares are now dipping below $12, which gives the Silicon Valley Internet giant a very low $15.6 billion valuation.

The company’s stock has dropped 34 percent in the past three months, as worries over a range of issues — from its Asian assets to its display advertising business to its talent drain — continue to be a drag.

Yahoo — which turned in yet another disappointing second quarter on Tuesday, but with all new excuses for the continuing decline in revenue — is now getting toasted by Wall Street.

That would be the marshmallow — and not the champagne — kind.

The stock of the Internet giant dropped below $14 a share, to close at $13.48 yesterday, after the company said its display advertising business in the U.S. was hard hit.

Today, it’s already down even further.

That’s close to an eight percent haircut for the past two days and a decline of 20 percent for the past three months.

In that same three months, Google is up over 13 percent, Microsoft is up over five percent, Amazon is up over 17 percent and Apple is up 13 percent.

You get the general idea here.

The decline means Yahoo’s market value is now only $17.5 billion, and more than two-thirds of that value is accounted for by its Asian assets (more than $9 billion) and cash ($3.3 billion).

That means its other properties are worth just above $5 billion now.

And while CEO Carol Bartz tried again — in a conference call with analysts after the earnings were released — to portray the situation as another part of her never-ending turnaround of the company, the issues at Yahoo are not new.

They range from display weakness to search declines to a talent drain to ineffective marketing to the lack of a consistent and fast-developing pipeline of innovative products to its flaccid board.

The earnings mess — no surprise, given estimates going forward were also missed — was seized on by investors and the press. (See, it’s not only me!)

In a column earlier this week in Forbes, titled “Carol Bartz’s 8 Blind Spots That Sunk Yahoo,” longtime and noisy Yahoo critic Eric Jackson noted:

“[T]he Bartz hiring is a cautionary tale to all boards and investors: An over-confident ex-CEO with no industry experience can make a bad company worse before things get better.”

But perhaps more damaging was a post today in The Wall Street Journal’s Heard It on the Street column by Martin Peers, titled: “Yahoo’s Unsurprising Surprise.”

It began with the cutting line: “Talk about having a credibility gap on display.”

Then it got worse:

“Admittedly, it may be that Yahoo has dropped off the radar screens of so many investors that this latest episode can’t do further damage. Certainly, aside from cutting costs, Ms. Bartz’s turnaround plan for Yahoo remains stillborn.”

That might be too kind if the stock continues to decline, a development that — in turn — might once again begin the speculation of Yahoo as a takeover target.

Which, if that could manage to get Yahoo shares back up, might be a reason to break out the bubbly.

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment, which — given stock prices are what they are — is probably a good idea.

Yahoo turned in another weak performance in the second quarter, with yet another decline in revenue.

This time it was five percent, compared to last quarter’s six percent. In other words, at least things are looking up as they go down!

While earnings per share rose smartly, Wall Street is still looking for strong sales growth from the Silicon Valley Internet giant, which seems unable to provide it.

Blamed most this time for the revenue fall: Yahoo’s changes in its display sales operations in the key Americas region, reasons for which were largely unspecified in the initial company press release. (You can see the damage in this slide deck from the company here.)

Maybe Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will explain it all in its upcoming conference call with analysts (or she could try the I-don’t-know approach taken by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch in PhoneGate hearings in Britain earlier today!).

2 pm PT: It starts with the usual regulatory blah-blah, which I always enjoy.

Bartz gets right into it, opening with the key problems with China’s Alibaba Group, as well as its display and search revenue weaknesses.

The fight with Alibaba is over its Alipay payments unit, which was spun out of the Chinese company without Yahoo’s say-so. Yahoo is a big shareholder.

Bartz says that the company was working on a settlement night and day.

But she quickly gets onto how display did not perform as expected in its key Americas arena. “Obviously, I am not happy,” she said.

Obvi! Neither are shareholders, Carol.

She says it was not about new competitive development. It was not about the economy. It was not about engagement.

So what was it? Changes in its sales leadership and organization, says Bartz, which has included talent walking out the door in droves.

A lot more than Yahoo expected, but no surprise to anyone who has been paying any attention to the brain drain at the company.

Bartz promises a new approach to sales, part of its endless turnaround, which is beginning to feel like a digital version of “Waiting for Godot.”

Search revenue, though, says Bartz, was better than expected.

2:11 pm: CFO Tim Morse is on now, running through the numbers and the display shortfall in the Americas region.

“We simply did not have appropriate coverage,” says Morse, noting consumer products, tech and autos as weak spots in the advertising market.

Thank goodness, then, for the guarantees from search revenue in the Microsoft partnership deal.

More numbers and then it is back to Bartz to talk about search, which is going better than the last quarter, when it was the culprit for the revenue decline.

She says that Microsoft and Yahoo were working together to improve the issues.

“We’d like to be further down the road,” says Bartz about the goal of search revenue per search growth, as well as settling all the other problems, such as the Asian issues.

And, by further, I am presuming she means actual forward movement, which is what roads are actually for.

2:27 pm: Q&A time, the part of our program where Wall Street analysts do not ask the questions that need asking (and where I win fancy journalism awards for pointing this delta out!).

Therefore, Bartz is first thanked for providing “color” about the display disaster and is not asked about more specifics of the disaster itself.

The second question still does not get to it either, but she does note Yahoo’s sales force has to sell beyond “Gee, we’re big” and come up with better ad solutions.

“The issue is we did not have enough sales people in front of the big clients,” says Bartz.

That’s because all those former Yahoos are now working at Groupon, LivingSocial, Facebook and on down the line and now in front of big clients for those hotter companies.

2:34 pm: Question about its Asian assets. Yahoo’s talks with Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba are separate, says Bartz, although I would add that they have non-movement in common.

And also a question about Yahoo’s interest in the acquisition of the Hulu premium online video service.

Bartz winks verbally and says nothing, which translates into: Of course, it is interested.

More on the reasons for the display fall-off, which Bartz makes clear is not due to big competitive threats, but internal issues.

Maybe she’s saving big competitive threats as the reason for a revenue decline in the third quarter!

I look forward to the quarter I get the finger pointed at me for causing revenue to fall, due to my snarky posts.

Now, we are into softball questions about improvements in engagement. It’s up, but no one asks why Yahoo is still not doing anything very cutting edge in product innovation compared to competitors.

I believe Google has launched at least 14 new social networks since this Sunday, along with its strong quarterly performance last week. And Apple, well, blew away its quarter today as it is about to release more cool new stuff later this week.

And that might be the crux of the issue for Yahoo, which might not solve its woes by throwing a more focused sales army at the issue.

That’s because Yahoo’s products are simply not nearly has social as Facebook or even Google right now, which might be the true problem as old customers move on to new advertising solutions.

Whatever the reason, Yahoo clearly needs a refresh of its ad products and how it sells them, especially in its fast-growing mobile, video and communications products.

Bartz talks about getting better expertise, a tighter regional focus and other issues of going to market, which is perhaps something she might have realized many, many quarters ago.

After all, she’s been in charge for a while, and these issues are not new.

In fact, in an earlier quarter, Bartz was stressing “tentpole” events and anchor media properties and the power of the size of Yahoo as a selling point.

This was in April, in fact, in the first quarter of this year.

As I wrote then:

“CEO Carol Bartz excited was the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s traffic gusher for big tentpole events such as the Super Bowl and the Oscars. In fact, Bartz practically sounded like a gushy “Entertainment Tonight” flunky when talking to Wall Street analysts about Yahoo’s Oscar news, games and other offerings. She proudly noted the site’s efforts generated more than a billion pages views.”

Now big is out! Moving on!

The last question is another about Yahoo’s talks with its Asian partners.

“It’s complex,” says Bartz.

You can say that again.

Tomorrow, Yahoo will announce its second-quarter earnings and, once again, Wall Street is expecting yet another meh performance from the Internet giant.

In his “cheat sheet” report, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney’s take is pretty typical of the sentiment of investors weary of waiting for a rebound in Yahoo’s growth.

“From $15, we believe YHOO shares have upwards bias,” wrote Mahaney, “but we don’t have real conviction.”

That’s become the unfortunate norm for Yahoo, whose management has continued to struggle with a variety of issues, from its ongoing talent drain to an unexpected and still unresolved fight with its main partner in China to the troubles in its search partnership with Microsoft to the overall lack of ability to turbocharge its advertising and other businesses as has been long promised.

While it is certainly not for lack of trying, the prospect of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz wheeling out another series of excuses for the lack of turnaround and — something many have been looking for most of all — a clearer strategic vision for the company on the earnings call on Tuesday, will surely not produce a dulcet impact on its depressed shares.

The stock has continued to dip well below $15 a share, down almost six percent last week and 13 percent for the last six months.

That’s why some think that Yahoo’s interest in bidding for the Hulu premium video service, which is being sold by its media giant owners, might be just the bold and risky move to get the company centered around.

With the online video ad business growing and the need for Yahoo to focus its many ambitions, some think Hulu could be a key piece in becoming the “premier digital media company” that the Internet giant has recently taken to calling itself.

By doubling down on what Hulu represents — that would be the premium online video business — it’s a fast-growing category Yahoo’s large sales force would be well-suited for.

In addition, a purchase of Hulu could give Yahoo some much-needed talent in the arena, including its CEO Jason Kilar and others.

“Of all the buyers, Yahoo is the most in need of a purchase to change its paradigm,” said one observer. “If it could not pay too much, Hulu would give Yahoo some differentiating that it really needs.”

Of course, paying too much for Hulu is a key consideration mentioned by all who are looking at it, including Google, AT&T, Amazon and others.

How to determine the value of Hulu’s content licenses, both now and later — given that once those rights expire whoever owns Hulu will eventually have to compete in acquiring the often high-priced material from Hollywood — is the biggest question they are asking.

Is that worth $1 billion or $2 billion? Can a new owner keep up the momentum needed to successfully maintain the Hulu business well after those content rights expire? And, of course, which company would be best suited to accomplish this task?

Yahoo certainly has all the potential to be at the front of that line, despite being managed erratically for far too long. But — also as usual — there is the endless debate internally over whether buying it will fix problems.

Whatever happens, most agree that something dramatic needs to happen at Yahoo, rather than the continual story of flatness that has been coming out of the company for far too long.

And we’ll all see if that’s improved after the close of the market tomorrow, when Wall Street is expecting Yahoo to report revenue of $1.11 billion on earnings of 18 cents.

That’s a revenue decline of two percent, which is not great, especially considering Google’s strong performance last week. Then again, it’s better than the first quarter’s six percent drop in revenue for Yahoo.

Like I said: Meh.

I love the smell of blog wars in the morning!

Acting as Facebook often does to Google, a new site started by former Engadget editor Josh Topolsky just hired away yet another passel of tech journalists from the giant gadget news and reviews organization.

Editorial movement is not uncommon on tech news sites, but this level of it from one site to another is somewhat, um, aggressive.

Engadget, which is owned by AOL, is one of the largest tech-focused sites on the Web. Topolsky left his editor-in-chief job there in March.

By April, he had grabbed eight prominent Engadget staffers who had left the huge tech site amid editorial tensions, in order to start a new competing gadget property for the well-funded sports content start-up SB Nation.

Now, sources said, Topolsky has added Thomas Ricker, an Engadget senior editor, who had run its European coverage; Sean Hollister, a senior associate editor, who ran its West coast team; and Joseph Flatley, an associate editor.

Also hired: Thomas Houston, editor-in-chief of Switched, an AOL tech site that was recently subsumed into its Huffington Post Media unit; and Dieter Bohn, who was editor-in-chief for the Smartphone Experts network of sites, including Crackberry and others.

And other possible new hires soon from Engadget: Another European editor, Vlad Savov, and writer Jacob Schulman.

The Topolsky-helmed site is still unnamed but is now operating as This Is My Next. It already has 16 writers, compared to Engadget’s two dozen, and is set to debut in the fall with a new name.

It will be the first content expansion at the Washington, D.C., SB Nation, which completed a $10.5 million Series C round, led by Khosla Ventures, in the fall.

Before that, SB Nation had already raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company and Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as from angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

Another AOL link: SB Nation was founded by former AOLer, CEO Jim Bankoff, who had bought Engadget for AOL many years ago.

Engadget Editorial Director Josh Frulinger said that the impact of the talent drain on Engadget — mostly from This Is My Next raids — has been small, since the site has also been aggressively hiring.

“We’re past the people leaving and into celebrating what we’ve accomplished in six short months, and we welcome any new competition,” he said. “Dana Wollman, Brian Heater, Myriam Joire, Zach Honig, Joe Pollicino, Richard Lawler, Michael Gorman, Sean Buckley, Joseph Volpe, Brad Molen, Terrence O’Brien, Amar Toor and Sharif Skar — all brought on in the past six months — are your Engadget stars of tomorrow.”

To prove it, AOL said unique visitors for Engadget in June were up 1.1 percent from May and will be up again for July. In recent reports, the site had 14 million unique monthly visitors.